Buy new or secondary for GTB?

I’d find out how they were able to spec a GTB. My understanding is the allocations were done and they were on to the GTS. If you are fine with taking the depreciation hit and that’s worth it to spec the way you want it than go for it. Otherwise buy used, save money and live with the spec

 

Used. 200+ coupes on cars.com. Price must obviously go lower. I’m waiting to pounce

 

I'm on the fence as well. As a matter of fact I'm going to check and see if I can lease one for a year. I refuse to buy one at these prices and then take a Hulk Hogan like beat-down when it comes time to get rid of it. Also, if I can acquire it through FFS that will give me leverage in case the car is in the shop for several months. Most likely won't have to make a lease payment to them because of loss of use. If I like it I can keep it but pretty sure I'd be done in a year. Too many people stuck with these right now and they are going to have to fire sale their price if they want to dump the car. I want to avoid that.

 

Where in the US are you finding new order to spec availability?

 

I had a recent similar situation. I was offered a 25' GTB new build to be ready summer 25'. I'm not sure the details of how it became open to me, but it was.

So my choice was to either build that (spec'd moderately to MSRP of 400k) and realize I would take an immediate significant depreciation hit or look to used mkt.

I ended up finding a 22' GTB w/5k miles MSRP 437k, which would probably be closer to 500k if ordered as a 25', and purchased that for approx. 350k.

Those numbers were meaningful (to me), so that's the direction I took.

Very happy. No regrets.

Brian


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You cannot read the spec so it is difficult to judge on a 3 year old car . Did you see the sticker ?

 

If you want one, buy a used one and save your money for something else.

 

Not sure how clear it presents online. Sticker is 461k less 24.5k for flying the car over from Italy!
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Looking at the current situation i would agree prices can only continue on a downward spiral as numbers increase and time moves forward.
Id be in no race either. Its all shaping up as another sf90 debacle unfortunately - but not surprising. The buyer is definitely in the box seat.

 

yah sounds like you'll be able to get a 296 for about 130K pretty soon. might as well wait.

 

Some dealers will soon be paying you to take them. (At least thats the sentiment of some people).

 

yeah. sure sounds like it.

i heard the F40 market is tanking too. carmax will give you about 75K if you're lucky.

 

I get a used 296 with many options I wanted now that they're obtainable close to $300k.

800 miles later I decided it was the best current Ferrari for daily+exciting for me even though it's hard to view a hybrid as a 10+ year car.

I had debated new GTS as I thought GTB was closed, but at that delta and given some uncertainty about sound on GTS, I had decided not to do that.

Then decided to just hunt a +~$40k upgrade to another used with +surround and +acc in good enough interior and ideally non-red external.

But last week I got offered a likely GTB allocation so I submitted for a new GTB at $400k (24 pricing) config with exactly what I want (all electronics, color/interior that I'd prefer). I probably wouldn't have done that if I hadn't done a bunch of miles in a pre-owned one though.

 

No, I'd buy pre-owned. There is a good choice of 296 GTBs and even a few GTSs in my country with at least 3 being in colour combinations that I would myself chose if optioning myself. One of the three is trading below the base price, the other two trading more or less at base price. Yet all of these cars have c.$100,000 of options that the previous owner would have paid for me. (Carbon bits that are nice to have, but that I would not have optioned myself if I'd been paying). All three cars under 1,000 miles.

I'd only commission a new build if either 1) the spread between preowned and new was much narrower or 2) the interior / exterior colour that I am looking for were unavailable.

 

There is nothing like speccing your own 296 a new order. YOLO go for it. You never know how someone else has used their car.

 

Agreed!

 

If you are talking GTBs then given the depreciation think personally it’s a no brainer to buy used. Here in the UK it’s not uncommon now to find used cars at -40% below list.

Having said that I ordered my GTS new as I wanted a Spyder not GTB and an early car and the chance to at least once (and only time?) spec a Ferrari from new to my own taste that matched (kind of) my 246 Dino.

Not sure if it’s the same in the US but in the UK there are far fewer GTS listed than GTBs (4-5x more) so prices of these haven’t tanked as much yet. It may be just a matter of time until they do but anecdotally I hear of plenty of buyers who were told they should order a GTB to use for year or so to then trade in for a GTS. However timing issues of the release of the GTB vs GTS as well as the steep premiums that Ferrari dealers then told customers they needed to pay to switch meant many declined and stuck with the GTBs (and/ or selling them now at a loss).

 

Exactly what I heard.

 

I just bought a 23’ 296 GTB for $356,000 with a $436,500 msrp and 255 miles on the odometer. Dealer was asking around 369,000. I traded in a porsche 2024 GT3 and a 23’ Corvette c8 convertible. I made a profit of $20,000 on my GT3 and lost $25,000 on the corvette. Dealers are trying to get $15,000 over my sale price on the gt3 and $10,000 over on the corvette c8. No commissions on selling the two cars and no hassle and I could deduct my sale price from the cost of the 296 and paid sales tax on around only $23,000 -

I probably should have held out for my fur st offer of $350,000 for the 296. The 296 is blu corsa with red interior and red steering wheel. Great looking car but not the most popular Ferrari combo.

The issue with the 296 is that there are a lot of these cars bought as stepping stones to other models and therefore were never driven. Now a year or more later a lot of these buyers want to sell their 296 - that they never drove - all at the same time. So a buyer has a large number of near new 296’s - with very low mileage in like new condition so if you buy one and drive it - like a Porsche owner does- and put say 3,000 miles on the car to sell this car would require a substantial discount from all the cars available with less than 1,000 - many with less than 500 miles. These cars for sale need to now move into the hands of real owners who want to actually drive and enjoy these cars before the value can stabilize or rise even. GT3’s hold their value because the owners drive the cars and if an owner drives his 3,000 also the pricing stats firm.

I can see losing $50,000 on the car in a year if I want to sell despite the original buyer having lost $80,500.

I had a deposit on a GTS but I am canceling this as I have a big issue with the horrendous driver interface in the 296 - the nav system is impossible to use, the voice system does not recognize any request for an address or restaurant. And the entire response time is horrible - very laggy. The system needs a $200 cpu instead of the $100 cpu Ferrari put in the car. And the haptic control on the steering wheel to type in an address, is ridiculously impossible to use to enter a destination. And if you use apple play the image covers all the engine information on the screen. The passenger screen does not let the selection of a unique address.
Very frustrating design that Ferrari should be embarrassed to put in cars they price at $400,000 plus.

Car is fantastic in terms of driving on the road but the digital interface design is laughable at best and led me to cancel my GTS order.

 

I bought mine for less figuring $50k loss in a year.

Not saying I'm right but I did the reverse, ordering new GTB after driving it 1000 miles over a few days, mostly in the wet.

I am on carplay generally when in the car. I like it in the center and the look of it overall despite losing rev counter (there's space for a rev counter in the upper left when on carplay, strange they didn't do that, and the HUD rev counter is uselessly slow and high end of the range only).

But LED wheel and audible revs were good enough for me.

I dislike using carplay via haptic pad but it works ish and I just use my phone to enter destinations. Only try to use the wheel controls to do basic stuff and slowly select carplay apps.

It isn't my daily or semi daily sports car though and I am mostly driving, entering destinations on phone, listening to podcasts or doing calls rarely.

 

Just seems like the Ferrari engineers really dropped the ball when it came to designing the navigation and user interface. As you noted it would have been easy to have added an rpm display on the screen or in the HUD.

And what is the advantage of having the buttons on either side of the steering wheel and for the driving modes for Edrive to competition - and sport - why have these disappear all the time requiring banging on these black plastic areas to get them to display so they can be selected.
So simple to fix all these flaws in the user interface design and the cost of faster response time would be trivial as well.

ridiculous that Ferrari does not bring their interface up to the standards of what is in a economy Honda or Kia small suv.

 

Mike has a great one for sale here: https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/2fas4u-2023-296-gtb-grigio-scuro-red-900-mi-mint.701671/

 

there really isn't any excuse in modern times for laggy interfaces considering the amount of cheap computing power availible

 

I don't know if you know this but you can move the apple car play interface away by pressing the home button for a few seconds. That way it doesn't take the whole screen. You can still control your music and all on the right side.

I am not sure why so many people complain about the interface, it is not that bad.